Nigerian pastor TB Joshua preaches at a memorial service in
Lagos, Nigeria, December 31, 2014. At least 115 people died in a building
collapse at Joshua's Lagos mega-church in September 2014.
Among many Nigerian and other African Christians, TB Joshua
is a prophet, a healer and a man of God. On Thursday, however, the Nigerian
televangelist is due to appear in a Lagos courtroom, alongside two engineers,
charged with criminal negligence that resulted in the deaths of more than 100
people.
The case relates to a tragic incident on September 12, 2014.
A Lagos guesthouse belonging to Joshua’s church, the Synagogue Church of All
Nations (SCOAN), collapsed, killing at least 115 people, including 84 South
Africans who had traveled across the continent for one of Joshua’s renowned
healing services.
The South African government reacted angrily to the event,
calling on Nigeria to conduct a thorough investigation.
Eventually, in July
2015—10 months after the incident—a Nigerian coroner ruled that SCOAN was culpable
of criminal negligence, since the structure had more floors than the foundation
could hold, and that those who built the guesthouse should be investigated.
The
Lagos state ministry of justice indicated its intention in November 2015 to
charge the SCOAN’s trustees, of which Joshua is one.
For their part, Joshua and the SCOAN rejected the coroner’s
findings as “unreasonable, one-sided and biased.”
The Nigerian mega-preacher
and his church maintained the collapse was connected to the presence of a
mysterious aircraft, which they alleged had been circling the building prior to
its collapse.
Even if Joshua is found guilty of criminal negligence, his
reputation will not be damaged among his legions of devoted followers,
according to Maria Frahm-Arp, an expert in Pentecostal Christianity at the
University of Johannesburg.
Right from the beginning, he’s been spinning this
story of this mysterious airplane and the idea that this was an attack by
Satan,” says Frahm-Arp. “The court can find whatever the court finds, but it’s
going to be seen [among Joshua’s followers] as an attack by Satan to try and
undermine and discredit him.”
Born in June 1963 to a poor family in a rural part of Ondo
state, southwestern Nigeria, Temitope Balogun Joshua claims to have been in his
mother’s womb for 15 months before he was born.
He says he received his divine
calling early in life, when he had a vision in which he was commissioned by God
to teach, preach and carry out miracles.
The SCOAN was allegedly founded with
just eight members; the Lagos’ HQ now reportedly attracts 50,000 worshippers
each week, with many traveling from as far afield as South Africa to see the
charismatic preacher in the flesh.
TB Joshua’s popularity extends online: his
Facebook page has more than 1.9 million likes and his Twitter feed 135,000
followers.The church even has a television channel, Emmanuel TV, that
broadcasts Joshua’s sermons and publicizes his miracles to millions.
And it is miracles that are central to Joshua’s ministry.
Videos on SCOAN’s website include testimonies from church members concerning
all kinds of healings, from the exorcism of demons to financial prosperity and
fortune to the restoration of a man’s private parts.
Joshua also claims to have
prophesied in advance the occurrence of multiple world events, from the death
of Michael Jackson, to the shooting down of MH17 in Russian airspace, to the
November 2015 attacks in Paris.
Yet some of Joshua’s prophecies have not yet
come to pass: the pastor prophesied in May 2014 that 276 schoolgirls kidnapped
by Boko Haram from their dormitories in Chibok, northeast Nigeria, would be
returned safely to their families. To date, 219 of the girls remain missing.
Joshua’s “health and wealth gospel” has a particular
resonance in places like Nigeria, says Frahm-Arp, where people are inclined to
turn to miraculous healers in the absence of the state adequately meeting their
needs.
More than 60 percent of Nigeria’s population—almost 100 million
people—live on less than $1 per day and parts of the country, such as the
northeast, lack decent infrastructure due to the ravages of the Boko Haram
insurgency.
They are drawn to something outside of the public and governmental
domain to try and find answers,” says Frahm-Arp.
The Nigerian preacher has found plentiful earthly rewards
for his ministry. In June 2011, Forbes estimated Joshua to be have a net worth
of between $10-15 million.
He has also developed friends in high places,
including the late former Ghanaian president John Atta Mills and Julius Malema,
the leader of South Africa’s left-wing opposition the Economic Freedom
Fighters.
His church has given much to charity: Forbes estimated that Joshua
gave more than $20 million to causes including the rehabilitation of former
Niger Delta militants between 2008 and 2011, and Joshua founded a Lagos
football academy named My People FC, one of whose graduates, Ogenyi Onazi, now
plays for Italian club Lazio.
According to Manji Cheto, Nigeria analyst at political
consultancy Teneo Intelligence, “pastor-preneurs” like Joshua have struck a
chord among Nigeria’s lower classes, who long for the lifestyles that their
preachers have.
A lot of people that he attracts are working-class Nigerians,
some very poor, and middle-class Nigerians either aspiring to retain or
increase their wealth,” says Cheto.
That sort of miracle-working pastor, who
has gained notoriety and is a bit of a celebrity, those are the sort of people
he would appeal to.
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